The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a movie based on a single chapter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. A captain’s log about what happened to the crew of the ship that transported the vampire from Romania to England. It’s a section of the story that has always stuck out, no doubt helped by movies like Nosferatu that made iconic imagery out of the appearance of a creepy vampire on the deck of a ship. But while it’s told from a singular perspective that nowhere else appears in the novel, it’s not a story in its own right that can be self-contained -certainly not in the form of a traditional Hollywood thriller. By design it has no resolution, it’s merely a bleak and chilling step along Dracula’s journey before he meets his end.
This film, with its somewhat unwieldy title, directed by André Øvredal, attempts to get around the limits of this conceit and the text itself, only making all the clearer the faults in adapting this portion of a story into a movie made in a conventional blockbuster structure. And that’s unfortunate because the movie, with its unique setting and monster, sometimes hints at the better ways its story could be related if it had more freedom, if it was permitted to be more detached from convention.
What doesn’t help matters is how the movie opens cryptically with text and imagery clarifying how the Demeter washed ashore on the English coast, a wreckage with no living crew member aboard. These kinds of introductions are very tricky for a movie to pull off without immediately discouraging the audience from investing in characters certain to die over the next couple hours. Of course none of the Demeter’s crew are subsequently drawn with much dimension beyond generic sailor stereotypes. Those who do have some semblance of personality and backstory are limited to Liam Cunningham’s old sea dog captain and Corey Hawkins’ protagonist Clemens, a black Cambridge-educated doctor constantly looking to prove himself.
The attitude towards this character by the film very much seems to be an attempt at something like Night of the Living Dead, where the most intelligent and competent in a small group endeavouring to fend off a monster is a black man who is himself subject of racist distrust and disgruntlement from his fellow survivors. That is indeed the chief source of animosity between Clemens and the crew who by-in-large don’t put stock in his medical capabilities and are quick to suspect him when strange things first start happening. Tied in with this is Clemens’ story of intense hard work and determination being met with obstacles of prejudice at every turn, and how this ultimately fuels his conviction on the Demeter to not let the vampire kill him. His struggle is not an uninteresting one, as a movie like Chevalier shows, but it feels out of place in a movie like this and very artificial in its sincerity –his race a rather easy source of interpersonal conflict and the structural racism of the time providing a shallow reason to care about a character who’s not much developed otherwise. Hawkins plays him well, but there’s not the courage or conviction in the screenplay of something like Night of the Living Dead. No boldness.
So much of the movie is characterized by this lack of narrative and aesthetic ambition. Too often it conforms to very rote action-horror storytelling devices and technical tricks. The exposition, almost entirely provided by Aisling Franciosi’s Anna -a stowaway, former familiar, and obligatory token woman for the story- is fairly dismal for its intense language. It’s structure, perhaps meant to resemble Alien in how it whittles down its cast of characters -killed or turned into familiars, lacks any sense of suspense or ingenuity. This is especially notable in the third act, even more predictable than these movies usually tend, and fairly at odds with the role of the Demeter in the larger Dracula story -rewritten to give the movie a proper climax and provide a hackneyed ending that circumvents the inherent bleakness of this tale. Either out of a fear that the movie couldn’t be justified by it or that an audience wouldn’t go along with it (or maybe more likely because it would involve difficult creative gambits that studios have no interest in entertaining), the movie is terrified of presenting the grimness of this chronicle for what it is. It is obligated to shoehorn in some catharsis or emotional optimism -or in one case a jump scare meant to dispel any negative feelings around a devastating plot beat.
Øvredal’s last American film was Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, and like he did there he endeavours to latch onto the good horror ideas here where they come. Mostly that comes in the smart instinct to keep Dracula semi-hidden and enigmatic for most of his attacks, and in the modestly more liberal use of gore he employs. Of course the former goes out the window the moment he decides to introduce cartoonish bat-wings to this supposedly menacing monster. However there are moments where Øvredal will, for instance, use shadowing to partially hide a crawling, decrepit Dracula, moments before an attack. Or he’ll introduce anomalies aboard the ship, draw viewer attention to the crates where the characters don’t yet know is his resting place. The design of Dracula leans into a kind of gargoyle appearance meant to look as gaunt and gnarly and strikingly sinister as possible -and becomes less interesting as the movie goes along and has to reveal more of him. He’s played by creature actor veteran Javier Botet under layers of CGI make-up; and while he initially demonstrates a creepy character to his movements, what we glimpse of his pale features, eventually he stops exhibiting any kind of tangible quality altogether.
As for the violence and the vividness of this action, the movie creates some great disturbing effects -particularly in the bloodsucking and the immolation scenes that come when familiars are exposed to sunlight. But in these too it feels like the movie is coming up short, refusing to go all the way with some of the more creative implications or else diluting the stakes entirely through lacklustre editing or blocking or just using those bat-wings as an ill-advised scare tactic. And of course as the cast runs out of expendable players there’s less appropriate violence to go around.
There are other things going on in the movie as the script attempts to give it a more fleshed out character; small story arcs for David Dastmalchian’s first mate, expected to inherit the ship after the Captain retires, and Cunningham’s nicely acted material (an impeccable highlight of the film) revolving around the relationship between the captain and his cabin boy grandson, played by C’mon C’mon’s Woody Norman. And the movie is almost able to execute these in a dramatically fulfilling fashion, but they’re rendered moot in the end by virtue of the difficulties of inserting them into this story. It’s very funny the way The Last Voyage of the Demeter sets up a sequel, when Dracula already is that and doesn’t have anything to do with the open-ended thread left here. But that seems to be the only thing Hollywood knows how to do. I don’t think this premise and micro-adaptation were beyond the scope of a good Alien-style thriller. But it needed a different set of circumstances and a different institutional structure to do so. Otherwise, it’s just Dracula: Cruise Control.
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